Austrian Economics is unpopular because
I refuted their theory. Nobody wants to be associated with a loser.
But everybody knows this. So I will take this opportunity to lecture you on tactics instead.
Marxism flies in the face of all logic and can easily be dismantled by any first-year economics student or even - gasp! - by the fourteen-year-olds who populate the Mises forum. And the Marxists know this. They've lost enough arguments to realize that logic is not on their side.
So, instead, the Marxists resort to two stratagems:
1) They re-define the term "scientific method" to mean Marxism, particularly the labor theory of value, which they will attempt to support with a blizzard of statistics.
That is what this guy is doing:
They put "theory" and deductive conclusoins above rigorous scientific methods.
2) The Marxists derail any thread about modern academic economics with references to events that took place hundreds of years ago in entirely different cultures. This is what Mentork (now banned) was doing when he responded to my thread about GE Theory (invented in the 1950s) with a picture of a teenager working in a factory circa. 1900.
That is what this guy is doing:
Quite they were not highly valued factors of production and were left to starve or move. Allowing for the English lords to reorganize the estates free of the lazy Irish tenants
The obvious response is to point out that the Irish potato famine occurred in 1845, twenty-six years before Carl Menger published
Principles of Economics in German, a language that few English lords read.
Also, you could have simply quoted footnote #6 of my
Critique of Austrian Economics:
Böhm-Bawerk was a better social philosopher than he was an economist. For instance, he writes, “We may define social capital as an aggregate of products which serve as a means of the acquisition of economic goods by society” (1959, v. 2 p. 32). He specifically excludes the means of subsistence of productive workers as a part of social capital. This focus on definitions may seem pedantic until we read that “There is but one basis for a contrary conclusion. That would be to classify workers, not as members of a civil society for the benefit of which the economy is conducted, but to regard them as objective labor machines. In that case – but only in that case – the workers’ maintenance would be in the same class as fodder for beasts of burden and fuel for machines; it would be a means of production; it would be capital” (1959, v. 2 p. 71). Böhm-Bawerk denounces “the tendency among English economists – often and quite justifiably censured – to regard workers as producing machines; that view made their wages a component part of production costs, and counted them a deduction from national wealth instead of a part thereof” (1959, v. 2 pp. 72-73).
C'mon you guys! Learn some tactics!